Help Project 72 Close the Pandora Loophole and #respectallmusic

Pandora and Sirius have decided to stop paying performance royalties to artists, producers and background performers who recorded before 1972–in other words, the creators of the greatest music that influenced us all and their heirs. Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson, Buddy Holly, Jack Teagarden, and everyone in 20 Feet from Stardom. Just to name a few.

This is due to a gotcha in the US copyright law–the Pandora loophole–that supposedly does not extend the SoundExchange royalty to recordings made before 1972 because the U.S. did not adopt federal copyright protection for sound recordings until 1972. The only problem with Pandora’s position is that there are lots of Members of Congress still in office who passed the 1995 and 1998 laws that created the SoundExchange royalty–and there is no Member of Congress who thought that they were creating a loophole so that Pandora…